


The Lord's Work

by insominia



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Gen, Religion, Scripture References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 17:14:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10417065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insominia/pseuds/insominia
Summary: "Are we going to talk about this?" Arcade asked, the courier's song filling the hallways of the Lucky 38 and echoing around the silent kitchen. Boone didn't look up from the plate of food he was halfway through devouring. "Boone," Arcade snapped, "how long are we going to ignore this?"---Arcade preferred the Courier before she went to ZionOriginally on FKM





	

**Author's Note:**

> In response to a prompt on FKM, original here: http://falloutkinkmeme.livejournal.com/5646.html?thread=13633038#t13633038

The courier stared into the mirror and pulled the skin around her eyes taut, then released. The wrinkles seemed to be growing more prominent with every passing day. Once upon a time she might have cared for such things, but not any longer. She'd told Joshua she was getting too old for this sort of thing, but he'd just chuckled and told her they were never too old to do the Lord's bidding.   
  
She turned from the mirror and turned on the shower, grateful for the luxury of hot water. She stepped under the steady stream and muttered, "wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin."  
  
The water poured over her, washing away the dirt and grime of the Mojave, and something else...  
She smiled into the rising steam and lifted her voice to the heavens. 

* * *

"Are we going to talk about this?" Arcade asked, the courier's song filling the hallways of the Lucky 38 and echoing around the silent kitchen. Boone didn't look up from the plate of food he was halfway through devouring. "Boone," Arcade snapped, "how long are we going to ignore this?"  
  
Boone gave an impatient sigh and stopped eating, "what?" he snapped back, more annoyed at being interrupted than anything else.  
  
" _Amazing grace, how sweet the sound..._ "  
  
Arcade held out his hands. "That."  
  
"So?"  
  
"So? It doesn't bother you how...righteous she's gotten? How different she is?"  
  
Boone shrugged his shoulders, "she gets the job done."  
  
"I'm not disputing that, she's just gotten so...so zealous about it." Arcade stared at Boone, the sniper evidently didn't share his concerns, he had already drawn the food back towards to him and was demolishing it with unhealthy gusto. "Sometimes I think that trip to Zion did her more harm than good," the doctor sighed, and turned back to his book.  
  
" _Was blind but now I see._ "

* * *

Boone and Six returned from what looked like a successful day in the Mojave; Boone looked almost happy. They were carrying considerably less ammunition than they had left with and their clothes were splattered with blood, blood, Arcade was gratified to note, that did not belong to either of them.   
  
"Where have you been?" Arcade asked.   
  
"Doing the Lord's work," Six replied, with a small smile.   
  
Arcade's eyes practically rolled into the back of his skull, "Specific. Good. Please don't feel the need to elaborate."  
  
Six chuckled, "we cleared out the Vault that Motor Runner had the fiends holed up in. I dare-say McCarran will sleep a bit sounder tonight,” she said, beaming a smile at Boone.   
  
Arcade stared at the two of them, slightly awed, "you two? Just the two of you took down an entire vault of fiends?"  
  
"We've faced worse," Boone muttered, loosing the clips in his his armour, letting it fall to the floor in heavy thuds.   
  
"Transgressors shall be destroyed together," Six said, cheerily.   
  
Arcade waved her words away, "must everything you say come from that damned book?"  
  
She arched an eyebrow, "a fine way to speak of the Lord's word. Now what's for dinner?" she eyed Arcade mischievously, "the Lord's work is hungry work."   
  
From the kitchen, Boone chuckled.

* * *

Before she left for Canyon Wreckage, she warned them she might be a while. She didn't know what awaited her there, but she had to go, and she had to go alone, she said fending off both men's offer of accompanying her. She didn't even take Rex, venturing into the wastes entirely alone.   
  
For the first few days neither Arcade or Boone gave it a second thought. By the end of the second week they would occasionally catch each other's eye, almost daring each other to voice their unspoken concerns. Another week passed and the atmosphere at the '38 had become one of tenterhooks, both of them reacting to the slightest noise as though she were returned, and inevitably falling into deeper melancholy when they realised she hadn't.   
  
"She's coming back," Boone said, abruptly, one evening without being prompted. Arcade opened his mouth to speak, but closed it without saying a word.   
  
It had been almost a month when the two had gone for a walk, venturing beyond Freeside in a rare jaunt, prescribed by Arcade as necessary to stave off cabin fever. They didn't run into anything that posed a problem. Boone took pot shots at some giant ants in the distance, but his heart wasn't in wiping them out. He gave up after a few half-hearted misses and gave an annoyed sigh, "she's coming back," he insisted.   
  
Arcade could not fail to miss the note of desperation, carefully hidden beneath his usual stoic demeanour. For Arcade, Six had been an interesting diversion to the usual monotony of life with the Followers, and she had been a welcome assistant in helping to change Freeside for the better. If she didn't return he would mourn her, he'd try and keep the momentum she built going, but he would return to his own life. Boone had no old life to go back to. Six had plucked him from a dead end in his road, the first person he had trusted in a long, long time. Arcade didn't know if Boone had a mother, or what he thought of her if he did, but it seemed to him that Six was the mother Boone wished he had. Not least because she was as good with a rifle as he was and had a penchant for hunting down Legion slavers. She'd started to turn his life around, no one had failed to miss the change in him after she'd all but forced him down to Bitter Springs. Of all the wayward strays and wanderers Six picked up along the road, it was Boone on whom she'd had the greatest effect. And it would be Boone who would suffer the most in her absence.   
  
"Mojave's a dangerous place," Arcade said, aware that Boone was waiting for him to argue the point, "and she's not getting any younger," he added, cringingly aware that he was closer to her age than Boone was to his. "You know what age can do, slows you down, makes your trigger finger rusty," his own fingers twitched reflexively to the energy pistol on his belt. He knew he sounded like Julie when she had to prepare someone for the worst, something that was probably a good thing given how useless he was at sounding sympathetic. Or at anything that required tact.   
  
Boone had turned his face, his expression unreadable behind those shades, "not her," he said, with conviction.  
  
Arcade had just about formed a reply when the cloud appeared. A massive cloud appeared in the East, clearly visible across the Mojave, despite the distance. The unmistakable sign of an atomic bomb landing. "That...that was a nuke," Arcade all but gasped, as the cloud dissipated "that was an actual nuke landing."  
  
Boone was smiling, "it's her."

* * *

Boone kept his ear to McCarran, chatted with the MPs that patrolled the Strip, and came home with more and more reports; unbelievable reports of utter desolation in the East. Entire Legion cities wiped off the map. NCR recon parties unable to press on for radiation, radiation which surely would have fried everyone and anyone within, assuming the blast front hadn't done that first.   
  
The courier arrived a week or so after that, a great deal dustier and wearier than after her usual outings. But her dull eyes still sparkled when she found them in the kitchen, her affectionate hand resting a moment longer on Boone's shoulder.   
  
"So," Arcade began, by way of greeting, "I hardly think it's a coincidence that you reappear days after the Legion has apparently been all but wiped out. Can we assume that was your doing?"  
  
"Oh Arcade," she chided, softly, "you know better than that. This was the Lord's doing. I'm just his willing instrument."  
  
"And just where did the "Lord" find a payload of nuclear weapons anyway?"  
  
She grinned at him in response, "the Lord hath opened his armoury and hath brought forth the weapons of his indignation."  
  
"You've got a verse for everything, haven't you," he grumbled, "do you have any idea how many you've killed?"  
  
That gave her pause, as it did Boone, the sniper shot him a look made of such ice, Arcade could feel it through the shades. "Is your problem that I've devastated the Legion or that I ascribe it, rightfully so, to the greater glory of God? I don't seem to remember you having such reservations over Nelson or Cottonwood Cove, and that's not to mention the amount of assassins we've taken out together."  
  
Arcade sighed and dropped it, somewhat unable to reconcile the sheer devastation with the fact that they  _were_  the Legion. And they had been crippled if not destroyed. And his hands weren't exactly clean in that regard. And that was surely what he wanted anyway. But nukes?   
  
"You really bombed the East?" Boone asked, Arcade noted he sounded happier than he'd ever heard him.  
  
Six beamed, "I did, and the slain of the Lord shall not be lamented, neither gathered, nor buried; they shall be dung upon the ground."  
  
"Not bothered 'bout that," he shrugged, "just glad they got hit and hit hard. Bout time someone did something."   
  
"Had an idea about that," Six said, the mischievous glint twinkling in her dull eyes, "there's a boat in Cottonwood Cove. Goes straight to the Fort. Think that'll be my next stop," she caught Boone's eye, " _our_  next stop?"  
  
Boone smirked, "probably the last boat we'll ever take."   
  
"Maybe," she laughed, "but I don't think the Lord's finished with me just yet."  
  
Arcade looked from the smiling courier to Boone, who was looking at her almost reverently, and decided he definitely preferred things before she went to Zion.

 


End file.
